can’t be up to code for a dwelling, even a temporary one.”
“We couldn’t find anywhere else that suited them,” said Willa with a sly smile. “Unless you’d like to offer them your guest room? There are only nine of them.”
That got Mrs. Hacker spluttering and twitching. “Well, they’d better have all the proper work permits from city hall!” she barked and retreated into the house, slamming the front door behind her.
The idea of permits filled Willa with anxiety, but the dwarves overcame it immediately. Barely five minutes after she mentioned it to them, a very official-looking piece of paper appeared stapled to the front fence. Willa read it over with great relief.
“Dwarf magic!” chortled Tengu as he took a look.
“Magic? What do you mean?”
Tengu sniffed the paper. “Gullibility paper. And the lettering too! This is a magic font. It invokes in the viewer the belief that the document is real and official.”
“A font can’t do that!” exclaimed Willa.
“Don’t believe me? Read the words carefully — it’s all gibberish!” he giggled.
Willa reread it, more slowly this time, the words flickering and changing in front of her very eyes. Tengu was right. The notice made no sense at all.
“Nice,” she admitted. “That should shut the Hackers up, for a while at least.”
It did. The fence helped too. None of the neighbours were able to get a good look at the dwarves, but they could hear sawing, hammering, and all the noises one associates with a house going up, so they stopped paying attention. The dwarves worked on, keeping to themselves. Willa tried several times to chat with them, to no avail. They responded to her questions with shrugs or mimed gestures, never saying a word.
Oh well, thought Willa. They’re not exactly friendly, but as long as the house goes up, I don’t care.
For the first week things progressed pretty well. The dwarves constructed proper supports for the stable and then cleared out the house rubble and redug the basement in record time. Soon a layer of beams and boards covered the hole, and presto — the dwarves vacated the stable and went to live in the new underground space. Not a moment too soon, as the fairies moaned continuously about their appalling odour and general lack of hygiene. They were glad to see the dwarves go underground.
Robert was so pleased, he was very nearly smiling, but he still grumbled to Willa about the stable’s creeping damp. “The nights are autumnal, we’re into October now, and it won’t be long before the cold is unbearable. And then what’s to be done with me, eh?”
Meanwhile, Willa’s home life was becoming more complicated, and not just because of Mom and Belle. Baz was really starting to act weird. Willa knew she had some catlike elements within her, but in the past she’d kept them under control, except when under the influence of catnip. Now, suddenly, her cat side seemed to be taking over. Baz had started night-prowling, slipping out the back door after dark on who knows what mission. Willa’s parents weren’t aware of these outings, but Willa woke up around midnight once and saw Baz out the window. The portly old lady was in the middle of a parade of neighbourhood cats walking tightrope along the top of a rickety old fence. In the mornings Dad often found a dead mouse or sparrow on the front step, and Willa felt certain that Baz was behind them. Willa begged her to behave, or at least to be more careful on those fences, but Baz’s only response was to narrow her eyes and grin malevolently. At least she spent her days safely napping on the living room couch.
That wasn’t all. Trouble was also brewing over the bird. The young phoenix was not a temporary visitor but a permanent addition to the family. As soon as she’d emerged from the flames of the house, the bird had been presented to Willa as her pet and her responsibility. This would not have been a problem if the bird had been more like her mother, Fadiyah, the wise old bird who had sacrificed herself to save Willa from the black worm. When Willa gazed into Fadiyah’s eyes she’d felt joy, confidence, and strength. Now Fadiyah was gone, and Willa felt a little lost in the world without her.
In contrast to her mother, this new bird was young and foolish and crazy and simply refused to listen. She sat quietly for the first few days, probably shell-shocked, but then the squawking and acting up began. Her harsh cries were like nails on a blackboard. Baz teased her into a nervous tizzy until the bird threw itself at the cage bars, sending feathers floating about the room.
Realizing that cat and bird in the same room was a recipe for trouble, Willa moved the cage to her room, but the bird’s fits did not stop. Willa was terrified she was hurting herself. Actually, to be perfectly honest, Willa was just plain terrified of the bird. She was big, about the size of a large hawk, and her cage took up the entire surface of Willa’s desk. Her gleaming white beak hooked downward to a very sharp point, and she had wicked claws. Large black eyes provided no clues to her thoughts. The soft white fuzz around her face gave way to glossy black plumage at the back of her head and down her wings, but she had a patchy appearance, since she kept losing her feathers. Willa tried different foods, toys, and distractions, and she covered the cage with a cloth to get the bird to stop squawking and sleep at night, but nothing helped. The bird fussed and butted against the bars of her cage until she was exhausted and fell into a deep sleep, to everyone’s relief. Then a few hours later she’d wake and it would start all over again.
“The bird has got to go,” Willa’s mom pronounced one day.
“Where?” Willa wailed. “We can’t let it go. It might attack somebody. And we can’t sell it or give it away. Phoenixes aren’t even supposed to exist.”
Her mom bit her lip. Willa pushed on. “Word would get around, people would start asking questions, and who knows what would get out….” Willa knew this would convince her mom, who was not keen on the whole town finding out they had a mermaid in the family.
“Can you at least try to get it under control? The noise is making me nutty.”
“I’ll try, Mom. I promise.”
Off to the bird expert. She found him coming out of the public library, one of his favourite spots, second only to Hanlan’s Hill. He was frowning and muttering to himself.
“Horace! I need to talk to you.”
He looked up at her. “I know I put it in the drawer.”
“Um — what?”
“My cufflinks. Scarabs in amber. They were in my drawer, and now someone’s stolen them.”
Willa couldn’t ever remember seeing Horace in cuff-links. “You’ve probably just misplaced them.”
Horace’s eyes flashed with anger. “I did not misplace them. They’ve been stolen by someone, and I know who.” He leaned closer to whisper. “Tengu.”
Willa was shocked. “That’s crazy! Tengu would never —”
Horace stiffened. “Crazy? Crazy? I’ll thank you to respect your elders, young miss!”
Willa looked at him in surprise. This didn’t sound like Horace at all.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean ‘crazy,’ I just …” Her eye was drawn to his coat, which was hanging crookedly. “Your coat’s buttoned up wrong.”
Horace looked down. “You came here to tell me that?” he sniffed but focused his attention on unbuttoning and rebuttoning. It seemed to calm him down.
Willa glanced about and lowered her voice. “I need to talk to you about the phoenix. It’s acting crazy, squawking and smashing into the bars of the cage, and I don’t know what to do!”
Horace finished with the buttons and smoothed his coat with both hands, his anger gone. “Look through its eyes,” he said. “Good day.” He turned and walked off.
“You mean into its eyes?” Willa called, but he didn’t seem to hear. Irritated, she watched him cross the street. How absolutely,